Dancing Naked in the Mind Field by Kary Mullis Read Free Book Online Page B

act helpless. And they help you. You make your points with your hands and your eyes, and the tone of your voice.
    Cross-examination sometimes comes down to the opposing lawyer forcing you to give a simple answer to a complicated question that you would rather answer with a yes or a no followed by a long qualification and some mitigating circumstances. The cross-examiner will hold you against your will to a simple answer. He’ll keep asking the question over and over. Your counsel will keep objecting. The jury sees you struggling. Sometimes the objections will be sustained, finally one of them will be overruled and you will have to answer. If you say “Yes, but” followed by a long explanation, chances are your explanation will be stricken from the record. It looks as if you’re trying to squirm out of something.
    I have mixed feelings about expert witnessing in a murder trial.
    Barry and Peter came by La Jolla, and I liked them right away. They were not super-cool-plenty-slick lawyers in it exclusively for the money. They were law professors from New York and had been using DNA evidence to get innocent people off death row. They told me that the newly developed DNA tests introduced into reopened trials established the innocence of one out of four convicted but unconfessed murderers. One out of four? I was surprised.
    If you find DNA in intimate association with a crime, for instance, in the underwear of a rape-murder victim, and it’s not the victim’s and it’s not the suspect’s, and there is no DNA present from the suspect, then you’ve very likely got the wrong man. On the other hand, just finding DNA at the scene of a crime that resembles a suspect’s DNA in every way you have examined it could mean many things. If you find the first two numbers of a social security number you can prove it’s not mine if it doesn’t match, but you can’t prove it is mine if it does. You need the whole thing to do that. DNA evidence as obtained by forensic labs is only the first two numbers. It has its limitations.
    Like just about everyone else, I was curious about the Simpson case. Barry and Peter said the DNA work had been totally botched, and after they showed me some details of their analysis, I could see they had a case. Not only had things been botched, but the honesty of the detectives, Lang and Fuhrman for two, was not at all clear. That wasn’t really my job.
    I got involved and I looked closely at all the details.
    The Los Angeles police didn’t know how to run a lab andprobably shouldn’t be expected to know any time soon. The very idea that a lab is run by one of the advocates in an adversarial contest is itself a little fishy. LAPD labs had some of the right tools but by no means all the right tools. People had been hired to follow the written instructions on the boxes of DNA investigation kits available from various manufacturers, but the people were young and they didn’t know the chaff from the wheat, or their ass from a hole in the ground. They were fresh out of college.
    After looking at facts, I decided most of the DNA evidence should be thrown out on first principles. I’m referring to principles of science that had been clearly established by the end of the seventeenth century. Nothing fancy. I agreed to demonstrate to a jury why I thought that.
    Once I had said yes, I started watching the trial, and once I started watching, I got hooked. Me and the entire AARP and everybody who was unemployed at the time or only had to work at night. The mothers of everybody I dated after that loved me. I could talk about the case. Sadly, the daughter had to work. It was the most incredible soap opera ever. Did it get awards? It certainly spawned a bunch of lawyer shows.
    I knew all of Marcia Clark’s outfits. I noticed when she bought something new, and I was horrified when she changed her hairstyle. I figured that when I was finally up there I would probably have lunch with her, the way professionals do, and tell